The International journal of pharmacy practice
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Clinical pharmacists play an important role in ensuring the safe and rational use of medicines; however, physicians in developing countries may not always recognize the wide scope of services that a pharmacist can provide to improve patient safety and achieve clinical outcomes. The aim of this study was to investigate the perceptions and experience of physicians regarding the role of the pharmacists, the pharmacists' ability to perform clinical services, their acceptance of new pharmacist roles and the extent of collaboration that can occur between the two disciplines. ⋯ Although a wide proportion of the physicians were aware of the clinical pharmacy principle, the service itself is not well promoted or applied. Greater effort needs to be directed towards increasing physicians' awareness and knowledge of the importance of clinical pharmacist and promote the benefit of the clinical pharmacy service.
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To explore the attributes of pharmacy choice for people with chronic conditions. ⋯ Patient-centred care is an important attribute of quality care as perceived by people who are regular community pharmacy users. These findings highlight the need for pharmacy staff to implement a patient-centred approach to care, thus meeting the perceived needs of their customers. A greater effort is also necessary to raise the profile of pharmacy as a healthcare destination.
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In 2007 Alberta, Canada, became the first North American jurisdiction to adopt prescribing legislation for pharmacists. In light of these legislative changes and expanded scope of pharmacy practice, we evaluated what ‘prescribing’ means to pharmacists in Alberta and the application of prescribing in pharmacy practice. ⋯ Prescribing had diverse meanings to pharmacists in our study, and appeared to be context-specific. Understanding the meaning prescribing holds for individual pharmacists is important to explore whether pharmacist's definition of this expanded scope has shaped pharmacists’ enactment of prescribing practice.
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Clinical pharmacists working in critical-care areas have a beneficial effect on a range of medication-related therapies including improving medication safety, patient outcomes and reducing medicines' expenditure. However, there remains a lack of data on specific factors that affect the reason for and type of interventions made by clinical pharmacists, such as unit speciality. ⋯ Clinical pharmacists with critical-care training make important medication recommendations across general and specialist critical-care units. The patient case mix and admitting speciality have some bearing on the types of medication interventions made. Moreover, severity of patient illness, scope of regular/routine specialist pharmacist service and support systems provided also probably affect the reason for these interventions.
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Pharmacists working collaboratively with general practitioners (GPs) in primary-care settings can improve patient outcomes; however, there are challenges to the implementation of collaborative services. A possible solution is the co-location of pharmacists within general practice clinics. ⋯ Various roles and methods of integration were identified for pharmacists in general practice; however, a number of barriers and facilitators to integration would need to be considered to ensure viability of services. Future research should explore different methods of collaboration and trial their implementation.